Can you spot the lies in your news feed? | Laura Smythe

The Fire Festival story illustrates how trust can be manufactured through curated celebrity and influencer content. Influencer- and celebrity-driven marketing sold 95% of tickets in 48 hours, and some buyers paid as much as $100,000. Laura Smythe distinguishes relatability from credibility: people may instinctively trust a person who feels familiar or approachable, even when that feeling is not evidence that their claims are reliable.

Journalists use a more deliberate process: they gather evidence, vet sources, check facts and bias, and work with editors, fact-checkers, and legal teams. Smythe argues that these habits should not be confined to newsrooms or journalism schools. A post’s popularity, or its prominence in a social-media or AI-generated feed, does not establish that it is accurate or complete enough to support a sound opinion.

The gap in verification skills is a civic concern as social media and AI shape how people encounter information. The U.S. has no national media literacy education standards, even as its media environment has changed faster than its civic education system. Smythe notes that 86% of Gen Z get news through social media. Media literacy can help people identify AI-generated material, deepfakes, and unverified news, while also recognizing bias in both articles and influencer content.

Evaluating a news item means looking beyond whether its claims sound plausible. Smythe advises examining its entertainment value, headline, visuals, tone, word choice, funding, and omissions. These checks apply to established journalism as well as newer forms of media: journalists make mistakes, and journalism is imperfect. Her argument is not to dismiss AI, social media, or influencers, but for traditional newsrooms and new media to learn from one another and build a news infrastructure that is both faster and more accurate.

Finland offers Smythe’s main example of a sustained approach. Media literacy is taught from K–12 through college and adult learning, with verification and source vetting incorporated into literature, algorithms and statistics into math, image editing into art, and differing accounts into history. In one exercise, students spend a week playing Troll Factory, trying to maximize an account’s visibility by spreading disinformation. Finland has ranked at the top of the Open Society Foundations’ annual media literacy index every year since it began in 2017.

Smythe connects Finland’s emphasis on questioning information and identifying propaganda to its independence from Russia more than a century ago. Finnish education officials view media literacy as a way to protect democracy by reducing vulnerability to deception. She also points to media literacy lessons in German primary schools, sometimes taught with visiting journalists, and says Australia has banned social media for children 16 and under, with Denmark following its lead.

For individuals, Smythe recommends checking sources, sharing verified reporting, subscribing to local newspapers, and seeking social-media creators trained in journalism. She also urges people to ask elected officials for national media literacy education standards and to challenge misinformation in everyday life. The broader aim is to make independent thinking a practiced civic skill, rather than assuming that a confident presentation, a familiar creator, or a trending post is trustworthy.